Colour in Visual Arts: Eating, Touching, Making & Other Methods

For some, colour is subjective, for others it's vital. In visual arts, is it a universal idea or a local material? As far as art themes go, this one leads to a world of possibilities. Curator Joana P. R. Neves welcomes María Castro Jímenez, whose Substack page "Pigments, Colours & Other Stories" reveals new pathways into art history, art making and creativity. Perfect for artists, ideal for polymaths, superb for creative souls and idyllic for those who enjoy a mix of prehistory, archeology, chemistry, anthropology and magic. Ultimately, this is the best art podcast to creatively explore creativity...

Art Topic is an art discussion segment focusing on the most intriguing art themes, or providing exciting new approaches to classic art themes in visual arts, with art experts, thinkers or curators (hosted by Joana P. R. Neves).

Hosted by Joana P. R. Neves

Guest: María Castro Jímenez

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Exhibitionistas is hosted by Joana P. R. Neves, a seasoned curator and writer with over 20 years of experience in the contemporary visual art field. She loves demystifying contemporary art by blending art history, theory, and personal reflections to reveal how art can uncover views on today's hottest topics as much as on everlasting existential questions.

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00:00 WELCOME TO OUR COLOUR EPISODE!

00:43 Is colour merely subjective?

02:33 Colour & Line in art academies

05:18 Colours are cultural. Is RED an exception?

01:02:54 BLUE, a favourite.

01:05:29 Book recommendation about colour in art

01:12:23 OUR GOODBYES.... until next time

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okay, Joanna, i it's time. You're a grown-up now. You can go into colour. A trepidation about colour? Why would your host be afraid of it?

SPEAKER_02 0:08

One of them said, I've tasted ochre for a stomachache, and it worked. It it tastes like blood because the thing that makes blood red is because it has iron oxide. Ochre and our blood are made of the same thing. I need to I need to taste this. I need to know.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

What is seeing color? Is it touching a word? Holding an idea? Grabbing an impression? Cooking a potion?

SPEAKER_02 0:34

My name is Maria Castro Jiménez, and I am a museum educator, an art historian, and a pigment and color researcher from Córdoba, Spain. I have a newsletter substack called Pigment Colours and Other Stories.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Welcome to another art topic episode where we devote our time to a very specific theme. This time it's colour and colour me surprised. I am a line person through and through to the point where I dedicated my PhD to it. But it's when I started reading my guest substack that I got completely hooked on the theme. And I think the danger here is that you may be completely hooked. Two. Exhibition This is an independent podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre Nevers. Because we're all both actors and spectators of art and life. Enjoy this new episode: Eating Colour, Touching, Making, and Other Methods to understand it. And so it took a long time to understand that he sees the world in gradations of beige, maroon, brown, grey, dark. It's darkish. And then there's these pups of color. And it took a long time to understand how he sees red. And how do you know the colors he sees? That's why it took so long because we had to debate there's certain shades of green that for me are already in on the yellow side of the spectrum. For him, it's all green. Okay, so one episode that was really, really almost troubling was that I used I I used to study in Paris. He lived there with me for a year, and I would go into the library to study of the Centre Pompidou, and he would come with me. Being an artist, he was interested in the section I was in, which was um aesthetics and philosophy. And so I would be working, he would be working by my side or reading or drawing, sketching, and he kept asking for the time all the time. What time is it? What time is it? What time is it? And at a certain point, and I would look up, look at the clock, digital clock, and I would tell him the time. And suddenly, because we're all both as absent-minded one as the other, I realized, why do I have to look at the clock? Why doesn't he look at the clock? And I said, Why why are you asking me for the time all the time and making me look at the time? Are you trying to tell me something? And he said, What clock? And I pointed up to him. He didn't see the numbers. It was a black background, and the digital numbers were red, and he saw a black rectangle. And that's when I knew he was colorblind. That's how I discovered. But did he know at the time? Yes, because his mother is also colourblind, his brother is colourblind. By the way, I think about 80 or more than that percent of the population, the colourblind population is male. Yes. So his mum is really, really in the minority. Yeah. And that's how we started talking about colour. And it may be one of the reasons why I was not really into thinking about it, because the experience of colour is so or can be so incredibly different from person to person. That for me I kind of put the subject, I put it aside as something that is personal. In working on the line, I ended up learning about the fact that actually line and colour were historically separated. Particularly in France at the Royal Academy of Arts, there were these huge debates about whether the line was more important than the colour. And there were there was a big majority for the line and a small major and a small minority of colour apologists. And then I realized that since Pliny the Elder, so since you know the beginning of our current era, there was this idea that the origin of art was the outline of a shadow, and that's where the skill was. And even throughout the Renaissance, this idea of design or so design was more than drawing, it was conceptualizing and materializing shapes and ideas, that was the excellence of art, even though the masterpiece, the work, the sculpture stemmed from it and then became something else. And and was so full of color. But the real quality of the art piece was in its design or in its drawing. So there was always this separation.

SPEAKER_02 5:40

I was thinking when you were saying that that even though this might be like kind of an artificial separation that was created from an intellectual point of view during the Renaissance, uh, even during prehistory, the first images we have uh inside caves, etc., they already might have this separation because we have carvings and we have paintings. So carvings are only lines. They pay attention, they paid attention to volume and shade and things like that, like the rock formations inside the caves, but they didn't use color in these cases. And then we have paintings that are probably the ones that are more familiar to everyone because carvings are very hard to see in photographs. So you're not gonna see a lot of carvings in in a prehistory book, for example. Even when you are inside caves, it's sometimes archaeologists don't see them. It takes them a long time to notice them. But we are more familiar with classic animal paintings in Paleolithic caves. And even in those cases, I think the most abundant kind of paintings are just the line, just a drawing without anything inside. Ironically, the ones we really know and appreciate are the ones that have a lot of color in them. Like, for example, uh Altamira cave in Spain is a lot of color, and then they used really interesting shades, mixing the red and the black to create the appearance of the animal for, and you can see all of this. So the ones that are actually more popular are the paintings, but probably they're in the minority when you think about all the things that are there. It's usually only a black line or a carbon. So this might be even an older debate than you were saying.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

There's a huge subjectivity that for me became the experience of color. What about you?

SPEAKER_02 7:36

I can remember exactly the conversation that took me into this. So I was talking to a co-worker in a museum, and we were we were talking about a painting in the collection, and in this painting, it was uh Philip II, a Spanish king from the 16th century. And usually in his portraits, he's always wearing black. There is this idea that the reason he wears black is because he was very serious, very austere, because he was very he was very stoic, and this is the idea most people know about him and his portraits. I was telling this to my friend, and she said, no, no, that's not the reason he wore black all the time, because it was a very expensive dye. So using a black dye was a way to show power. And I was like, What? How is it possible that I didn't know this? It said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, because when they when the Spanish uh arrived in America, they found new dyes and pigments that were very high quality, and and that was a way to show wealth. She flipped a switch in my mind. I was like, I need to know more about this. So I started reading about this, about and then it was a whole new world I didn't know about, and I went into the biggest rabbit hole ever, and I'm still in it six years later because I realized I didn't know where color came from, and I studied art history, so how was it possible? I no professor ever told me, oh, this is how paint was made, or this is the colours that were available at different uh historical periods. I I never got this in a college class.

SPEAKER_00 9:14

So we have a very conceptual relationship to colour, is what you're saying. As opposed to the economy of colour, the politics of colour, the materiality of colour, the technicity of colour. So what do you what was the thing that when you fell into that rabbit hole that completely pulled you into it after that first shock? What was the thing that kept you going?

SPEAKER_02 9:39

Now everything is industrially made, so we don't we don't know how it is made. For us, it's just color, it's just a visual characteristic, but it's not something that is made from a specific material. I was shocked that I never uh wonder about this, and no one ever mentioned this in in an art class or working in museums. It's like I need to know, I need to I need to learn about this new world that it was um like was it was hiding in plain sight, and now that I see it, I cannot unsee it.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

You know, it's like I see it everywhere. How does it affect your relationship to color on a day-to-day basis? For example, is that is there an impact on the way now that you relate to things?

SPEAKER_02 10:21

I was watching a documentary not long ago, I think it was about um China and a different historical period in China, and they wish I don't know if it was about the Great Wall or some royal tombs, I cannot remember. But they were making kind of a small recreation about the people from the past, and they show prisoners working at uh great works from for an emperor, I guess, and they were all wearing this very intense red in this documentary, and I was like, this is so wrong! Like you would never use this super expensive, super exclusive die for a prisoner to be working on some royal tomb. So I see these kind of things all the time when I watch, like, for example, like a TV series about ancient Rome. I'm complaining. I I guess I I got very annoying about this, complaining all the time. Can you quickly tell us about the color purple, precisely in the Roman Empire? Tyrion purple was originally made by the Phoenicians, who are a group of people who lived in current Lebanon. And they were travelers and merchants, and they didn't have a lot of resources in their land, so they had to be very inventive, and they were incredibly inventive. And they discovered that from a mollusk that you can find on the beach, you can make this intense purple. Sometimes it's like a dark red, it's not always the same color, and it was it's very high quality, so it's very it's very long-lasting, it doesn't fade with the sunlight, which is the most common thing to happen with dyes. And they create like a like kind of an empire, like a merchant empire from this, because they started selling this color all over the Mediterranean. When the Romans learned this secret, because all this knowledge was secret, it became even more exclusive. They decided it was a color only for the royal family and only for the Roman Emperor, and it was even a death sentence if someone else tried to wear this color. So it became the most exclusive color ever, and then it continued to be a royal symbol during the during Byzantium. So it was for a long time it represented royalty, I guess, and power.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Purple was the plastic surgery of our time in some ways.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

I think it was more exclusive because it was even more exclusive, way more, yeah, because a lot of people that are not very rich can maybe get uh surgery, but this was just like okay, I'm gonna give you an example. You need 10,000 uh seashells to get enough dye for just like a tunic. They almost made this whole species disappear. Do they still exist? Yes, they do, and and they are the reason actually I think they traveled so much is because they were following, like looking for more of these uh seashells. And they came to Spain and stayed here. They stayed in southern Spain for that reason, because you can find those seashells uh in here. And they are the people who founded uh the first cities in Spain, Cádiz and Malaga, because they had these seashells available to them and they started uh a whole industry of tulip and purple in in southern Spain.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

You know, there's this Arctic fight, this fight for the Arctic for the rare minerals. I mean, the same old story, right? The economy of the materials is incredible. But what I enjoy about your approach is that you're not really concerned immediately by the colour theory and these colour charts that we usually study in in art history. You're looking really into the materiality of colour. And this story really encapsulated very well your interest in that um materiality. So tell me a bit more about how it is that you approach the subject from that perspective.

SPEAKER_02 14:29

I think at the beginning it was because I realized that colour was a material first, and I I had never considered the material aspect of pigments or dice, because I think the industrial revolution is very important in this change of perception, because now everything is made in a factory and in a synthetic way, and we don't know how it is made, but that was not the case before.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

Do you know that Marcel Duchamp, I remember reading about him uh when I was like fixated on his work, and I remember him saying that a tube of paint is already-made, so ready-made is a concept that he coined around 1913, which is this idea of the found object in some ways. And so he said, you know, painting is already made because you are using ready-made to make painting. So just to corroborate what you're saying about the impact on even the idea of art making that the industrial revolution brought about.

SPEAKER_02 15:32

I think it's one of the most important changes in all history. Now we don't know how most things are made, but before that, people were very conscious of that because it was very expensive. And and another thing in that is good to consider this is the idea of fixed colors. For example, Pantone has this classification of different colors with a number and a name, and we know this is this specific blue, or we know this is blue, but for people from the past, it wasn't exactly like that because it didn't have fixed colors. So they knew what indigo was, for example, a plant that is used to make a blue dye, but you would never get the exact same color from a natural source. So depending on the specific plant or the specific seashell or the process, temperature, recipe, etc., you would get different colors. Similar but different. So the important thing it wasn't the kind the shade of blue you got, but that it was indigo, you know, because the the important thing was the material, the source.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Are we talking about art making? Uh painting? Are we talking about uh textiles? Everything. Okay. So that's really interesting. So the relationship to indigo would change depending on the technique that you applied to the material what that is extracted from. Now I'm curious about also the differences between the kinds of indigo, say for example. Um does that also help in terms of knowing where a painting comes from or knowing where a textile comes from and identifying certain art pieces or yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:18

Uh there is a hot topic now that is called provenance research in pigments, and they trace the origin of a particular paint. So, because you can study the geologic properties of a like you know, this is a specific mineral, and this mineral can only be found in this region. So we know either these people had to go there to get this mineral or they had to trade with someone else. And if it was from very far away and very scarce, you know this was uh valuable, and they took uh it took a lot of effort or resources to make this paint. More specific case would be Maya blue. I don't know if you're familiar with this term. So it was a specific paint made by the by the Mayan people in Central America, and uh you can get different colors with Maya blue. Sometimes it looks more like turquoise, like greenish, sometimes more like a light blue, because it depends on the process to make it and the plant. So they used indigo, but sometimes they heated the material uh during maybe more time, less time, or higher temperature, lower temperature, or maybe they mixed the pigment with specific um clay or specific binders. So that changed the color. The important thing in Maya blue was that it was made with indigo and a specific clay, and that was the thing that made it Maya blue. It wasn't the color, it was the materials used for the recipe.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

So now I'm curious as well in terms of how you would identify color and refer to it linguistically. You're making me see that the words we have for colours are a sort of reduction almost on in a culinary sense of much a much wider spectrum of relationships to colour. So would colours be referred to in different ways, say in the 13th century, in the 15th century, in the 17th century?

SPEAKER_02 19:27

Yes, it was this is one of the things that makes historical research about color more difficult because they used a lot of different terms. Sometimes they were talking them always about the same pigment, but we don't know. So we just get like 10 different names and we don't really know what they are talking about or if they are referring to the same thing. And also the terms for color changed a lot from one language to another, from one culture to another. We don't really know the color of Tyrion purple because it could be sometimes more purple, it could be sometimes be more red, and sometimes even like closer to blue. So this is another example in which you can see the important was the material. It was made from this specific seashell, but you don't know exactly the color they got in different places. So sometimes it looks more like a very dark maroon, sometimes it's referred to as royal blue, or sometimes it's closer to our idea of purple, but a very dark one, not like a light, like a very intense black one. So it's very hard from language and without clear images to even understand what was that color for them in in the past, and because the way they conceptualize this color is not the one we use today. So it's very hard from language and without clear images to even understand what was that color for them in in the past, and because the way they conceptualize this color is not the one we use today, so it's sometimes really don't we really don't know what they what they were seeing or what they were talking about.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

Western culture and particularly Europe is considered to have a very poor relationship with colour and being less colourful than other cultures and other parts of the world. I'm thinking about the book Chromophobia by David Batchelor, who has this whole theory about the fact that we are so fixated on white and purity, minimalism, and absence of colour, means that there is a real difficulty with otherness and this association between colour and the feminine, as well as being one of the reasons of the sort of misogynistic um background that we have in Europe. But now I'm also thinking on the other side of things, which is maybe we didn't have. Have that much in terms of materials on the ground in the soil, the insects, because some colours come from insects as well, from living beings. So maybe it's also our landscape and the the resources that we have.

SPEAKER_02 22:15

Yes, uh, you're definitely right. One of the reasons why European culture is not as colorful as those of Africa, for example, or South America or Southern Asia is because we don't have as many colorants in the landscape in the plants here. The closer you are to the Equator and the tropical regions of the world, the better pigments and dice you're gonna get because you have more plants, you have more animals. So, for example, India is very rich in pigments and color sources, but Europe, especially northern Europe, because of the climate, the the weather we have here and the plants and animals in this kind of landscape, we don't have as many color sources. Like all the the colorants we've mentioned so far are not from Europe. Indigo is from Asian America, and Tyrium Purple is from the Mediterranean.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

I have been uh following your publications on your Substack page, and you talk a lot about your walks outside. Going outside, looking at things, picking up things, and you have sort of transformed my relationship to my own walks because I think, oh, I have such a poor relationship to my surroundings because I don't think at all about this. Uh, apart from through my own daughter who uh was making gum arabica the other day, and I was thinking, What is happening? You know, what is this? And it was from a cherry tree. So it's really fascinating to see someone who actually can pick things around their home and make pigments.

SPEAKER_02 24:02

I look at everything as a potential pigment, I guess. So one important thing that happened is that I discovered there are ochre mines very close to where I live. This is another shocking moment because I've been here my most of my my life and I never knew that there were ochre mines in this area. And I was first told by a local archaeologist, and he told I was asking probably about pigments, and he said, Oh, but you can go get some red ochre in in these mines. He brought me my first actually piece of ochre.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

What is ochre?

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Yes. Ochre is an is a mineral that contains iron oxides, and it's usually it's either uh yellow or red or brown. It can be sometimes more like purply or more like orange, so it's this range from light yellow to dark brown with red in the middle, and it's the oldest pigment in the world used by by humans from pre from the stone age because it's very abundant. You can find it if you go outside. You're probably gonna find some iron oxides on the on on any kind of soil that you see. But in this region, particularly there's a lot of very good red iron oxides. So there is a mine that is uh exploited right now, very close to where I live. And most people don't know about it, as I was saying, because we don't pay attention to these things. So when they told me, I decided I wanted to go there and see for myself because I need to I like to interact in person with things. I don't like to just thinking about them, I want to involve myself physically, and I I I decided to go and search for this place. I just took my car and drove and I asked people around, like, do you know where this is? Because it's not something so easy to find. I started locating all the ochre mines, most of them are abundant right now. There used to be a lot more, there's just one that is open right now, but all of the others are abandoned. So you can go there and you can just take rocks from the soil, and it's an amazing pigment. They they actually make red paint with it in in a factory, so it's used to make paint. And uh then I decided I had to try and learn how to turn that into a pigment, so I got into this path to learn how to make all these things for myself. So that's the reason I started going to just going back to okra.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

Uh now that you're saying that it's the oldest pigment, it's bringing to mind something that I read um a while ago, which was that there was this uh the remains of a shaman uh from the Paleolithic, if I'm not mistaken, found in what is now the Czech Republic. And the shaman's body, so the all the bones were covered in ochre paint, and so it was presumed that the body was completely covered in ochre, either for the burial or as a shaman.

SPEAKER_02 27:18

Um I am very interested in the archaeology of human origins, it's called. So it's the way you study human evolution through archaeology of the Stone Age. So now pigments in this period are like huge. They're becoming a very important research field that was completely ignored before, I don't know, maybe 20-25 years ago. In scientific papers, they usually have this perspective about chemistry and geology, and they got this pigment for this place, so they traveled to get it, and they ground the pigment, but they don't really talk about the physical experience. Like pigments are physical things. So I think there's an important part of research that is that you do things yourself if you can. Because you're gonna learn things you're not gonna learn just reading about it or thinking about it. When you touch something, see something, smell something, you can even taste it because uh in some places in Africa, people still eat ochre for stomachache, for example. This is another thing I wanted to mention about pigments as a material, is they usually have medicinal properties. So this is another whole dimension to these materials not only for making color, they usually have other uses as well. So they usually have spiritual value and they also have medicinal uh properties. So I remember listening to a conference uh from some archaeologists, and one of them said, I've even tasted ochre because someone gave it to me for a stomachache and it worked. And they usually said it it tastes like blood because blood the thing the thing that makes blood red is because it has iron oxide, it has oxygen oxygen and iron. So ochre and our blood are made of the same thing. And I said, okay, I need to I need to taste this because I need to know.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

I was listening to another podcast called The Infinite Monkey Cage, which is a sort of a scientific BBC podcast, and they were talking to geologists, and they said that the best way to know the properties of a stone is to lick it or even try your teeth on it. And it was everyone was absolutely you know flabbergasted, but all the geologists were laughing and saying, Yeah, of course, of course. That's how we that's how it's done, that you cannot not have that relationship with the with what you're studying. And it was really fascinating because it really correlates to what you're saying. And I didn't understand at the time, but now I see that it's probably to do with the components and the that tells them the components of the of the of the stones that they're the you know the the specimens that they're dealing with.

SPEAKER_02 30:19

And because sensory information is is important too, but we don't really consider that in academia, for example. Everything is very intellectual and theoretical, and you cannot know everything if you don't learn from every possible source. So if you interact with a material and you see the color and the texture and and the way you can use it and how it feels and the smell, the taste, you get a lot of information that you wouldn't get just, you know, in a lab. You know, there's a lot of other dimensions to this research, to the different uses, you if you want to understand the medicinal properties. And uh another thing that that is used for is like is uh sunscreen. So if you cover your skin with red ochre, with red ochre paint, you will protect yourself from the sun. And this is something that they probably already knew in the Stone Age, like a hundred thousand years ago in southern Africa, and it's still done today by indigenous people in Africa, they still cover their skin and it's a very good thing.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Yeah, the coal, so the and also the the coal that you put inside your eye, apparently by the Tuaregs, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I read somewhere that it was also protective because of the winds that carry sand and dust.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

Yes, so it usually it usually has yeah, it's true, and and some kind of coals contain uh lead, a little bit of lead. So even though you would think this is toxic to put it in your eye, there is some research that says it was actually good to fight infections in your eyes because the small amount of lead would stimulate your system to defend itself from infections. So it was actually a way to protect your eyes in a very literal sense. And this was discovered not very long ago. And trying to understand if uh the coal made in ancient Egypt was toxic, why would people use it for so long? This is another thing we have to consider with this kind of wisdom, is they weren't stupid, you know. It's like because they didn't have modern science doesn't mean they didn't know what worked or how to use things. So if they used coal in Egypt for thousands of years, it was for a reason. If it was terrible, they wouldn't have used it. So this is another thing to consider in this kind of ancient knowledge or indigenous knowledge, is that there is a whole uh other realm of knowledge that goes beyond a lab.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

Elizabeth, the Queen Elizabeth, right? She covered her face in white lead and destroyed her health because of it. And also there was another one, Diane Du Poitiers, who would dr would eat gold and uh uh destroyed her her health as well. She would drink it, I think, in in something in water regularly, because she believed that it was good for her. I mean, I'm sure it probably wasn't her, it was someone around her. And it's so interesting that as soon as you introduce cosmetics, because now we're learning that the cosmetics we use are a big part of them bad for your health, because they are not at all connected to that sensorial experience and ancestral knowledge. We are trying to look for effects rather than having a previous connection to those materials, which kind of ties in with this idea of drinking gold because you think, oh, it's wealth, it's rare, therefore it's good, and applying a symbolic um power to colour through the effect only and not through the whole history, um can bring really bad results and outcomes, apparently.

SPEAKER_02 34:25

Yes, and and there were cosmetic practices in the past that were bad for you. I mean, it's not like everything was great, yeah. Yes, and in the same the same today, because one of the things about pigments that was quite a discovery for me as well is most of them are toxic, toxic.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

So, Maria, I think now is a good time to talk about your page because you have started developing in your page a pigment guide. So that's one of the reasons why I invited you because it your essays are really fascinating, but I think it's interesting for the listeners to know that all this knowledge that you're just giving us um, you know, a little glimpse on today, you are actually uh compiling it in uh a guide that you provide on your page.

SPEAKER_02 35:20

So, my first content in Substack was more theoretical, it was more about the history of pigments. I talked about uh Maya Blue or Trion Purple or Indian Yellow, and it was about the history of these materials. But then I thought about making something more specific about how to make pigments yourself, and then that developed into make your own materials, and it was like it was like a whole thing because uh I am experimenting all the time with everything I pick up in my in my walks, so I I learned how to make your own charcoals from for drawing or your own uh binders for your watercolor, and and I realized I could explain and connect all this knowledge in a more like practical way, how to make all your things, and maybe for people interested in this process or for artists who want to explore to make their own paint or their own materials from their own landscape. So you don't buy something that comes from a factory or that comes from very far away, but you might have a lot of things in your own place that you haven't explored yet. And maybe you can find minerals, maybe you can find wood or plants that you can use to experiment in your own work. So I decided to create a different section in the page that was about this process. And so I have both. I have the theoretical, historical, archaeological exploration of pigments, and then the practical way to actually make those things yourself if you're interested in doing that.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

Can you give us an uh like a little tidbit of something that might be useful for someone reading the guide and looking outside through their window and thinking, oh, I may just make that with something over there.

SPEAKER_02 37:25

Yes, I think the first thing you have to learn is you have to look at the ground with different with different eyes. Because when I've because I teach workshops about this in person too, here where I live. So I noticed that when I talk this to people, the first time we go outside and we find potential pigments in in the landscape, at the end of the class, they're looking at the ground non-stop and and with curiosity, you know, like, oh, I never considered that these things that I never never paid attention to might be useful to make paint. And oh, they they start to notice the color of the rocks or the soils that they never looked at before, or they start to pick everything up like I do and and touch it and think, oh, this might be good, or maybe not.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

Because we talked about toxicity. And I was thinking about my experience of doing studio visits. So acrylic paint is incredibly polluting. You clean your brushes, you wash them, and then the acrylic goes into the water, goes into the layers of the ground. I do question artists and I ask them if they know that they're polluting, and uh you know, whether they're concerned, and of course most of them are. I mean, m all of them I would say, even. For artists using paint is not just thinking conceptually about colour, paint is a materiality, and so one of the first answers I get is well, yes, I would love to give up on acrylics, but I don't like all paint because acrylic is fast, it is great, it has a different texture than oil paint, and then what a color. So they develop their skill with that particular material. It's also a question of gesture, it's also a question of reaction to the canvas or whatever they paint on. So it is a real issue for artists nowadays to make sure that they can um rehabilitate maybe other techniques, but because you mentioned toxicity, I was wondering if there's if that's something that you come across this idea of the polluting material, and uh because you obviously we're listening to you, and I'm pretty sure my listeners are thinking the same thing, which is oh, it's organic, it's natural, therefore it's great and it's better, and why don't we um as artists, as craftspeople, use those materials that you're advocating for?

SPEAKER_02 40:04

Well, I have to say first that natural doesn't mean safe. So um there are a lot of minerals that are toxic as well. You mentioned before white lead for makeup, and and white lead has been used for I don't know, millennia as the main white paint. And it's always been toxic and it was used as makeup in ancient Greece even. So if you get something from nature that doesn't make it safe necessarily, but it's true that a lot of colorants made today for paint, for dice, for our foods, you know, for everything we have in surrounding us can be toxic and are made in a synthetic way. So one way to maybe try to go more natural and and more organic is making things from your own landscape, you know, because I mean depending on where you live, but you probably don't have a lead mine where you live. I don't know, probably no. If you do, don't go get to get piments, of course. Uh, copper, for example, is another mineral that can it is is they can make green and blue in the form of malachite and azurite, and can be very toxic. The other day I posted a picture, I think, or or a video on SAPStack showing that I have some malachite in like in a stone, and everyone was warning me like, be very careful, it's super toxic, copper, it's terrible, and I don't have it in powder, I just have the stone. And some people even told me wash your hands afterwards. So, some minerals that are used to make pigments since a long time ago are toxic. And one of the things I cover in my pigment guide is safety measures. So be careful when you go there, when you pick something, when you touch you touch it, or if you try to make it into a pigment. But I explained that you can use some things to protect yourself if you're worried about that. And because the only way to know if a soil has heavy metals is you have to take it to a lab and they tell you exactly what it has. And maybe that's not available to you or you don't want to do that.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

We're talking about toxicity, right? We're talking about something that may harm us, but that can live in nature. Yes. But yeah, yeah. So acrylics are different.

SPEAKER_02 42:36

You're right. Acrylics are different because it does uh damage the environment. So yeah, you're not gonna you're not gonna hurt your landscape with the minerals that are already there. It's more to protect yourself. But another thing I think is interesting about this is when you use the materials around you, you are helping the environment in a different way, and it's they don't have to travel from far away. Because when you buy something, sometimes it comes from the other side of the world, and there's a lot of pollution in the traveling of all the goods that we get from other continents, other countries. So it's a way to also be conscious about using your the resources in your landscape, learning how to do this for yourself, which also think is interesting to be able to make something for yourself with your own hands.

SPEAKER_00 43:36

Is there are there any organic materials that in the same way can be polluting in the sense of uh hurting the environment?

SPEAKER_02 43:45

I think in the case of plants and animals, no. But in the case of minerals, yes, because for example, cobalt, zinc, cadmium, all of these minerals are used to make colours. Zinc is used for water. White cobalt for blue and cadmium for red and yellow, and they usually give you a warning when you buy these pigments, like be very careful where you throw this away when you wash your hands, don't breathe it in, don't touch it with your hands. So, yeah, if you pour this into the land, it might kill the plants around it. But if it's a very small amount, you know, and it's just like a piece of land that is not it's not a garden, you know, it's okay. But yeah, you you have to be mindful.

SPEAKER_00 44:37

Yeah, we go back to the idea of the lead and the coal, where it's actually good if it's in a small quantity. Because I think that's also the the intricacies of preserving the environment, is also because again, we think conceptually about things. So we think lead bad. But you just gave us such an interesting example where it's a question of quantity, and there's this kind of like panic nowadays with so many foods where people think, Oh my gosh, I can't eat this, because even synthetic foods, oh, it has this cholera that's really bad. But actually, research has shown that in small quantities your body is able to just wash it off and it's not bad for you. So there's also this very intricate chemistry and measuring of materials that is so interesting to know when you kind of get into the materiality of these elements and not just the effect that they might have. And maybe regulating aesthetics through that history is something that could be interesting to think about, you know, kind of regulating the relationship we can have visually rather than regulating um our whole lives through visual impact, maybe subverting that relationship is not such a bad thing, actually. Because that has been brought about by technology, for example. This idea that you take a picture and then you see if you had fun or not, you know, and you look at your phone and you assess things through the recording of them or through the image or something that you extracted from that moment or that environment, you know, in a very kind of like strange parallel. But it might not be a bad idea sometimes to subvert those things and um and to be very mindful of uh absolutes, I guess I would say. I think it's a good warning um about that. And by the way, for those listening and interested in the pigment guide, we will have uh an exhibitionist's discount that will be in the show's notes. Um, if you're interested in going into this experience of looking at the world differently, but also making your own materials. All of you 97 countries that listen to exhibitionistas, the great advantage of Substack is that it's international. So wherever you are, um, Maria's knowledge is worldwide. The discount will be in the show's notes, it will be in the newsletter as well. So look out for it. Find out more about the guide on the link in the show's notes or in our newsletter, or go to Substack and look for Pigments, colours, and other stories by Maria Castro Jiménez. And stick around to know Maria's book recommendation on the topic. So um, we talked about pollution. I wanted to go over that with you, and now I'm really interested in asking you about this whole colour investigation that you're doing and this focus that you have on precisely that, knowing where materials come from, have a have a direct relationship to them. Does it lead to some sort of ethics or good practice through experiencing colour the way you do?

SPEAKER_02 47:59

I think for me the the greatest benefit is the connection with nature because you go outside, you pay attention to your environment. Sometimes we're in the kind of lives we have, we're so busy, we're going around all the time, we don't even pay attention where we are. So it's like being conscious of the place you are, the the nature, going outside, getting some sunlight, touching the plants, touching dirt, it's true that it's helpful. You know, it's not something people say not touch grass, you know, it's this thing that is said everywhere online. But it's true. When when you when I do this, I feel I always feel better afterwards.

SPEAKER_00 48:39

And I think it also kind of reframes the notion of the output of the artist. Because again, going back to that topic of quantity, that is very much related what we with what you were talking about, which is making your own things. There's this horrible trad wife movement of making everything, which is absolutely ridiculous. It's not what we're talking about, but here we're talking about the ethics of production and the ethics of aesthetics in some ways. And I think it's really interesting what you're saying because me coming from the side of the market and having worked in commercial galleries and knowing also that side of the contemporary art fields, there's this idea of constant innovation and this output. So there's art fairs all over the world. You work with a gallery that does 12 art fairs in the year that that happens. That has happened. I don't know if there's nowadays not so much, but there was a moment where there's this intense participation in art fairs. And if an artist is selling well, the gallery is bound to ask for new works each time. So, how can you produce an outcome as high as that, you know, when you have so much demand? And that's also the thing that is interesting if you subvert things and if you think, okay, so maybe it is time effective to buy your own pigments, but then if you make your own pigments, aren't you also reassessing what you can and should produce and also finding other ways to produce in a more um sensible, connected, reciprocal relationship with your environment? So I think it's it's a really interesting uh thing to really look at things in a completely um reversed way as you are proposing. And there's also something about this relationship to colour that is disconnected from that experience, which is the symbolic power of colour. So, as you were saying in the beginning, and I'm going back to this idea of um uh Philip II, right, who was dressed in black, but immediately um by obscuring the economy of colour and putting forth the symbology of colour, then that's the relationship we have with it. And I have read so many articles that you've written. There was one about Adam and Eve. There are so many articles that you so you revisited a lot of aspects of things, narratives, uh historical pieces that we think we know, but then you bring us into a completely new perspective through your knowledge of colours. So what can you say about the symbolic power of colour? So maybe starting from Europe, also our perception we have of colour, um, this allergy that we seem to have to it somehow.

SPEAKER_02 51:58

Yes, well, one of I usually say Europe is the it's the poor continent regarding to color, and this probably ties to colonial colonialism, you know, because historically in Europe there wasn't access to that many color sources, that's one part of it. And then the other part, and and I have a post about this on Substack, is about uh Protestantism, because when the the church, the Catholic Church split in two, so we have the Catholics and the Protestants. One of the things the Protestants rejected from the church was color. Because the Italian Renaissance, again, coming back to the beginning, was very colourful, and the church of the 16th century was crazy colorful. You have all these the bishops were in these reds and these purples and everything was gold, you know, that because color was a way to show wealth again. So they rejected color as because for them, color was the Catholic Church and it was the Pope. The result of this is that we have all these new Protestant societies where the preferred color for clothing or for your for design was black, white and grey. And sadly, from the 16th century onwards, we have societies that are colorless in general. You know, if you see the portraits of this time. If you see Luther, you know, he always wore black, he was very he was everything was monochromatic. And then we have the next step in this process is that the industrial revolution happened in Protestant countries. So all the production of goods, of clothing, of cars, of housing, everything started in Protestant societies where they already had a philosophy of kind of colourless design. So the result is that today, like when you see people wearing suits, when you see people trying to dress up, is everything is in black and white, because that was that's the norm. And and interior design is uh is always white and light colors, and we have IKEA, you know, that made everything white. Protestant countries as well. So there's this aesthetic that is connected to originally a religious ideology. People don't know that anymore, but it it was so influential that four or five hundred years later. Western aesthetics is comes from the Protestant societies and industrial processes in these countries.

SPEAKER_00 54:50

I find it very difficult these absolutes regarding colour, and we go back to symbs uh the to the symbols of colour. So, for example, the the white and the blue, which is aristocratic. So do you have a sense of the importance of the symbology of colour and uh the whether the it's universal or not?

SPEAKER_02 55:15

No, because now we're connecting it's not universal. Okay, two examples, you mentioned blue being royal or that's a process started by the French in the Middle Ages because blue was it became at some point the colour of the Virgin Mary. So that's why blue in clothing and in some ways, you know, all these uh Disney characters were in blue, blue dress, the innocence, the purity connected to Mary in in religion. Then it became more popular in the monarchy, so the in heraldry, the the French monarchs started to use blue as their color at the end of the Middle Ages. So now we have a connection between blue and um and royals, but it wasn't always like that in southern Europe. Blue was not a relevant color. The Romans didn't like it because they thought it was a colour of the of the barbarians of the north. Because in northern Europe the the tribes of you know Germany or or the current day UK, they paint themselves in blue. They use body paint in blue, and and and Julius Caesar writes in in all these battles he was always narrating about his own glory, you know, that these people from the north are painted in blue, and and they explained that they painted themselves, body painting blue. So the Romans didn't really, blue was not important for them for their culture, they were all about red, and blue was something of the barbarians of the north, and it didn't become more prominent until the end of the Roman Empire. So it wasn't an important color in antiquity in southern Europe. Maybe it was in, you know, in Asia and other parts, because in India they had they had indigo for a long time and and they used it, but in Europe it wasn't it wasn't that relevant, especially in the South. So until this process of the Middle Ages and about the connection with the French monarchy and heraldry and the Virgin Mary, blue was not very relevant in in the European societies. So it depends on politics, religious ideology, uh, natural sources, it depends on a lot of things. I would say the only color that is probably a universal is red. I think it's probably the only one that you could say it's universally felt. And it's very important in every culture. It's usually connected to power, it's connected to war because uh to violence, to the gods of war, probably because of blood. It's connected to life and death because of blood, and because everyone has red blood, no matter where you live or the color of your skin, that's a very universal thing. And because color is the first pigment used by humanity since three, four hundred thousand years ago, that's a long time, since before the Homo sapiens. So in every prehistoric culture, you're gonna find red ochre, you're gonna find red in uh burials, burials, as you said before, on the bones, clothing, you're gonna find it in paintings. So this I think red somehow is connected to our cognition in a more universal way and to our blood. But all the other colors have symbolic meanings, it depends on the culture. For example, yellow was very important in China, it was the color of the emperor. In Europe, yellow was a cheap, terrible color connected to sickness and to prostitutes in some cases in the Middle Ages, and to being on the margins of society. So it was the opposite of yellow in China.

SPEAKER_00 59:33

And one last question. Um, so we have this idea, right, that it is universally perceived when you see a rainbow that there are seven colors. Is it that universal? Does everyone have the same colours? Do all cultures have the same amount? Well, that that basic spectrum of colours that we teach our kids when, you know, when they're speak learning how to speak?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:02

No, because some in some cultures they don't even have language for certain colours. So if they don't have language for them, it's not symbolically relevant in their own cultural expressions. I was reading the other day that until very recently the Japanese language didn't have a different term for green and blue. They didn't make a distinction in language. It doesn't mean they don't see their different shades. But in language, they someone explained to me the other day they had a name for the warm colors like red, yellows, orange, and they have a name for the cold colors, green, blues, and violets. So that was the only distinction they had in language. And even today, uh in the West is very funny, but because we don't see it, we see a different way. But they have a the traffic lights, the green lights, they call it blue. So this they have a very different relationship with green and blue and the language used to describe uh colors than we do. Again, the Industrial Revolution made it possible to create a lot of synthetic colors. For example, colors like pink or brown or orange were not, they didn't really exist in previous societies. It was maybe orange and pink were a different way to see red, but they're not they wouldn't have a different category to say, oh, but this is red and this is pink. No, it was a light red. They wouldn't make a difference. So now we can make a lot more colours than previously, and before making all these different colours and having fixed colours and being able to produce always the same shade. People didn't see it's not they couldn't see, of course they saw, but language has uh is hugely important in how you perceive the world. If it's not categorized in your own language, you are not gonna perceive it the same way, even though you see it. It's not gonna be separated in your mind. Green and blue are gonna be the same color. You see they're different shades, but you put them together because that's what you learned in your language. So it depends on uh a lot of different factors. I would be curious to know if in rich in richly colored cultures like India they have had like a very specific color language earlier than us, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:36

Maybe someone who's listening can chime in. I hope so. You can leave comments on Spotify, YouTube, um, reply to our newsletter, go on Substack, um, reach out to Maria. Maria Substack is like the most popular Substack ever, and everyone chimes in. Do you have like a sort of a top comment or top tip that you got from someone who you know surprised you um or who had a strange reaction?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:06

I've noticed people are very interested in this topic. I I mean I thought it was very I was like the odd one out, you know, because I was so into this. But when I post about this, people, as you say, they really respond like they are interested and they want to know more. I think they have a little bit the same experience I have with that same first conversation. Like, oh my gosh, I didn't know about this. How is how is it possible? There's this whole world I don't know anything about. And then people are very I think the most popular things I have posted are always about blue and about blue pigments. So my most popular, yes, my most popular post it was the it was about blue pigments, three historical blue pigments. It was about Egyptian blue, uh Han Blue in China, and Maya blue, and and uh that was crazy successful. I got a lot of subscription from this post and comments, and then every time I post a note about lapis lazuli or the use of blue in in modern painting, like people get completely crazy about that. I'm not sure why, but I think blue is a favorite color for a lot of people, and it's also the most difficult color to make in nature and the most hard to create. That's why it wasn't important in Europe for a long time because there weren't that many sources of blue.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:33

In the Renaissance, it was hugely important, the blue.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:36

Yes, but that was the moment when ultramarine, that is the blue made with Lapislazuli, started to be very popular. From colonialism, yeah. And it came from Afghanistan, because the biggest uh Lapis Lazuli mines in the world are in Afghanistan. So because of the Silk Road and and the new travelling roads and and exploration, a lot more of these colorants started to make their way into Europe. Yeah. In the 15th century. So the Italian Renaissance took advantage of that fully, and especially in Venice, because that that was the main port in Europe, and all the the things from the silk they got all the goods, and that's where you will find the most ultramarine blue anywhere in Europe was in the in the Venice paintings and the painters. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:31

Last thing, do you have um, I know you have a book that is really important to you. Um, do you want to talk about it a little bit? Say the author, the title. Do you have it with you? I have it here. I don't know if you can see it. Well, for those who can't see, it says Michelle Pastorau. The title is Blue The History of a Colour. And indeed, it has a religious painting with the Virgin Mary at the center holding the baby and a lot of gold. Blue and golds.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:01

Yes, from the Middle Ages. Um, this book is part of a collection of I think there are seven now. Each volume is dedicated to one color, so this is the history of the blue color in Western Europe. I have to say, it's not the whole world, that would be possible. And then there's red, black, white, yellow, green, and pink. And I have all of them. This is the first one I got, that's why I showed this one. Because it was very important for my interest in color and my research. I had no idea there were books dedicated to one color, and then you could cover the whole history of a place just from one color. And I don't think there is anything like this, to be honest. I think it's very unique. Huge recommendation for me. And this this is the first one I read, and I was like, I really enjoyed it, and I was like, oh, this is fascinating. And I buy everything from him. And I think it's very unique because I I haven't found anything nearly close to this kind of research and work. And I think it's worth it to read. And you can find it in French. This is the only English edition. I think now there's some translation into Spanish as well. But if you read French, you're sad because you have all the books and they're cheaper in French. This one is from Priest Princeton Press, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:36

And so they're all of them are translated into English from Princeton Press. Yes. And some of them are translated into Spanish. Yes. And of course, originally they were written in French. So you can also find them in French. Okay, so there's there's some possibilities. That that's already.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:52

Yeah, there might be more languages. I'm not sure. I know about those three. There might be others. Maybe German, I don't know. And I really, if you're interested in the symbolic and historical aspect of color, I think this is the best thing you can you can read.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:09

But I'm surprised because I thought that was not your interest. So tell me more.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:15

It is. I mean I am interested in everything and everything, as you know, it's like I cannot choose. I I think I got more into archaeology and prehistory later on, but at the beginning it was more the history of colours in general. And this is more of a historical book. It's not he explains the symbols and what it means and why and the language and everything. He's not go he doesn't go into recipes or the material aspect of colour, not as much. But he he just knows so much. I don't think there's there's no one who has all this knowledge in in their head, I think. And he goes to the original sources in French, Italian, English, and German, I think. So he has the original information, you know, the original documents from the Middle Ages and in Latin and things like that. So I find that there is a very good source and a reliable one, because that's a thing that that I worry about in research, and I think it's very difficult to assess nowadays online with AI, and sometimes you don't know if what you're reading is true or where it comes from or how that information was compiled. So if you have these kind of sources that you respect, that you know that if if there is real research behind the kind of work, I think it's very valuable in the information landscape of the present. So that's another thing that I like. Like if something comes from from him, particularly from this researcher, I I believe it because I know there is real work behind it.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:03

Did you know I did not expect that AI was going to be a weapon in the fight against ageism? Because now if you see that a researcher is about 80 or 70 years old, you can trust all the previous material. Because you know it was not written by AI. So from 2015 to you know until 2015, you still know that at least there's some maybe it's dogmatic, maybe you know it's um it's biased, as m most theory is anyway, but at least you know it is authored, and it is that person's work. That is a surprising outcome.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:44

Yes, and he went to an archive and learned, you know, he read uh a codex from the seventh century or something. Exactly. Yes. He explains everything at the beginning. Like, this is where I get my information, and wow, you know.

unknown 1:11:01

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:02

I like that because it's trustworthy.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:06

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm all for that. I'm all for look locating, locating, locating, and contextualizing is really important. Thank you so much for making yourself avoid available in a really, really busy time. So thanks. This was really, really enjoyable. I hope you come back to the podcasts. We have to do something about prehistory.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:25

I would love that. Thank you for having me. It was very fun. It was this talking about color is always fun for me. So this doesn't it really feel like work? And I would love to do an episode about prehistory because I think there's a lot of misinformation and prejudice about that time as well. So it's interesting to uncover.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:46

Agreed, agreed, agreed, agreed. Okay, so you know, Maria's coming back, and we're gonna do a special on prehistory. So this is a promise, it is coming this episode at some point. And yeah, thanks so much for being here. It was a real pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening, thank you for watching. Until next time in two weeks. Take care, have fun, have a great time, despite everything that's going on around the world. And do go visit exhibitions, look at art, because whether you're happy, whether you're sad, it is always there for you to carry your emotions or to take them somewhere else. Exhibition Listers is an independent podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre Nevis. Because we're all both actors and spectators of art and life. If you're new here, you have a whole catalogue of episodes to enjoy. Discover them at your own pace.